“Farewell to Kamla. Death as Politics,” by Hashem Abushama, is a Communis original feature.

“Memory, Saidiya Hartman reminds us, acts like a phantom limb, a sensation that something—the limb, the geography—is still there, which bucks and kicks with all the pains associated with the missing limb, the missing geography. The heart of that is an anxious renewal of a commitment to keep that memory alive—not as a stored file in an imagined cabinet, but as a ground of committed political praxis that still sees Palestine as extending from the river to the sea.”

— Hashem Abushama

Death as Politics[1]

Last March, at an approximate age of ninety-five—she did not have a birth certificate—my grandmother Kamla left us. Kamla means ‘whole’ in Arabic, and yet she lived that wholeness in fragments.[2] As the ongoing genocide politicises all death in Palestine, Kamla’s death takes on new meanings, bringing the many fragments of her life into an unexpected whole. One cannot understand death without the many lives that flow into it. One cannot understand Palestine without the many Palestines that make it. Kamla.

Kamla experienced all kinds of Palestine in her life. From Gaza’s surrounding villages where she was born, to al-Safiriyya in Yafa where she got married, and finally to al-‘Arroub refugee camp in northern Hebron. Like everyone else in al-‘Arroub, she endured a harsh life of poverty and displacement. Having married a much older man, she soon had to raise a family on her own. Despite this hardship, Kamla was fond of singing Palestinian folk songs; she was playful and humorous with an infectious smile that very quickly reconfigured her features—, an image that repeatedly comes to my mind.

The fragments of Kamla’s life were comprised of layers upon layers of dispossession. She saw the village, the camp, the settlement. She experienced both the Nakba and the genocide. In the end, Kamla’s death was an ostensibly “natural” one.

As Zionist colonialism and U.S. imperialism continue to wreak havoc across the region, uprooting families, destroying the built and natural environment, and systematically killing human life, my grandmother’s death, though natural and antiheroic, remains fundamentally political. This grief, so foundational, brings together memories of the primary violence that got us here, to the violence that Zionism continues to sow in its unresolved and unquenchable quest for further colonial pioneering—from Palestine to southern Lebanon to southern Syria. These are differentiated, spatial temporalities of grief—here and now, there and past—that are intimately linked to one another in the current conjuncture, even if one remains more foundational in its effects. Grief in motion—for all that is lost across space and time, and for the people whose lives the Zionist State continues to make wretched. To live under settler colonialism in its constant strife to change space into settler space is to constantly grieve for space. You grieve for the roads you know, the houses you have lived in, the trees that guard the pathways, the shops you have frequented, the bakery you had owned. You grieve for the space while clinging to and fighting for it. The farewell to Kamla brings to the surface geographies that Israel has consistently, albeit unsuccessfully, aimed to bury.

Kamla was older than Israel, having firsthand experienced the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, when she, along with more than 750,000 Palestinians, were forcibly displaced by the Zionist militias. For any Palestinian I know, the death of that generation is political, marking both loss and renewal—a loss of a memory that struggled to weave what it could of its own suffering. Memory, Saidiya Hartman reminds us, acts like a phantom limb, a sensation that something—the limb, the geography—is still there, which bucks and kicks with all the pains associated with the missing limb, the missing geography.[3] The heart of that is an anxious renewal of a commitment to keep that memory alive—not as a stored file in an imagined cabinet, but as a ground of committed political praxis that still sees Palestine as extending from the river to the sea. Such “rememory” is anxious because its ground is phantom-like—memory can never be fully recaptured, and it is in the struggle to record it, think with and against it, reckon with its absences and limitations, that the politics of renewal lies. Notions of grief, loss, and defeat, and their associated feverish needs for remembrance, are not new to Palestine. Though they wrench the heart and, sometimes, temporarily appear as paralyzing of all political possibilities, they have always been rearticulated to new political horizons and possibilities.

Before the Nabka, Kamla lived in al-Safiriyya village eleven kilometres to the east of Yafa, on a piece of land that now mostly remains vacant, overlooking al-Lud airport (otherwise now known as Ben Gurion airport.) She and my grandfather owned a house and a bakery which were located near the railway that formed a node on the Jerusalem-Yafa line. In repeating her Nakba story, my grandmother often started with the bakery and the house, and their demolition at the hands of the British colonial authorities in the 1930s. Home demolitions were commonly used as a tactic of punishment for those involved in the Palestine Great Revolution of 1936-1939, especially the fellahin, whose lives were most ravaged by the Zionist conquest of labour, capital, and land, and whose sweat and blood provided the lifelines for the revolution. Growing up, the house demolition was a passing detail to me that only built up for the 1948 moment—the seismic hour of dispossession and rebirth in Palestinian collective memory, where the structure and the event conjoin to announce the arrival of continued and entrenched expulsion As I grew older and more agitated by history, I came to understand 1948 as an accumulation of contradictions, some of which date back to the Ottoman Empire and its gradual privatization of lands held in common. Crucially, the rise and defeat of the 1936 revolution and its co-optation by the reactionary Palestinian ruling blocs at the time contributed constitutively to the catastrophe of 1948.[4] Layers upon layers of dispossession.

A few years ago, while looking through archives of the newspapers published in Palestine prior to 1948, I coincidently came across al-Safiriyya. My research was about Palestinian cultural productions and their coverage in the newspapers. Thus, the village’s appearance took me by surprise—as if this phantom memory/geography suddenly insisted on finding a body, a face, and letters to concretise it. I had always clung to the oral histories conveyed about the dispossessed geographies of Palestine, but I felt a confusing sense of validation in finding a piece of Kamla’s story in an archive. This could be the result of having gone through educational institutions that put too much emphasis on the written and academic archives. But it could also be the result of having finally found more details of a story I knew only as a headline in a larger arc of continuous dispossession. Or both.

The news headline from al-Difa’ newspaper of September 23, 1936, read: “A complaint from the people of a village to the High Commissioner.” It noted:

“The people of al-Safiriyya raised the following complaint to the High Commissioner through al-Ramla district commissioner. We, the people and families of al-Safiriyya village, which is part of the Jaffa district, protest—and strongly—against the violent acts committed by the authority in our village in the morning of Sunday September 20^th, 1936. A force of roughly 400 British soldiers led by the assistant district commissioner, ‘Mr Pollack,’[5] came to the village equipped with weapons including rifles, machine guns, and armoured vehicles, which spread horror in the hearts of women and children.

“And, at 10.30am in the morning, the force roamed the village and walked around it without accountability. Then, the choice fell on the house of Abdulmohsen[6] Mohammed [Abu]shama for demolition, and it consists of a public bakery for the village and a house for residence.

“And, at 11.30am, the horns were heard announcing the demolition process, and indeed, smoke covered the village and eight more houses were affected and became unliveable.”

My family would rebuild the house and the bakery, though the time from the demolition to the dispossession in 1948 remains a blur. As part of their systematic plan for the control of Palestinian territories and the establishment of the Jewish State, the Zionist forces dispossessed my grandparents along with all the residents of al-Safiriyya in May 1948. My grandparents ran away to stay with relatives in Iraq al-Manshiyya, near Gaza. This escape to their loved ones nearby explains why most of the village residents ended up in Jordan, while my family, along with many other refugees from the environs of Gaza, ended up in a refugee camp near Hebron. Iraq al-Manshiyya was then again displaced by the Zionist forces in February 1949. After a series of temporary displacements, my grandmother found herself along with many other refugees near al-‘Arroub water-spring, which would later become the al-‘Arroub refugee camp. She and my grandfather would stay there and rebuild a bakery, and a home from a tent to a room to a house, and a large family of thirteen children, who would then go on to have many more children and grandchildren. It is in the streets of al-‘Arroub that I spent the first eighteen years of my life, and it is there that we still witness the encroachment of settlements that eat more and more of the natural and built environment. Differentiated temporalities of dispossession that remain linked in the present. Nakba time remains with us but gets elaborated in the rhythms and contingencies of today: continuous colonial pioneering in the West Bank and its associated modes of necropolitical violence, genocide and siege in Gaza, repression and social engineering of “crime” amongst the ’48 Palestinians, bombardment of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon… fragments lived in whole, a whole lived in fragments.

In 2018, as my grandmother was starting her battle with dementia, I took her, along with my father, to Yafa—her first encounter since 1948. I consulted what one could, and what every Palestinian who attempted such a return has: the Nakba app, the Zochrot maps, the Palestine open maps, to locate as a proximate of a location to the destroyed village as I could. With the help of a friend with an American passport who could move around our land much more than we could, we landed near the neglected land of the village, where two abandoned and partially destroyed buildings remain and where many cacti trees still live. We had to park on the hard shoulder of the highway, where my father and I quickly jumped over the highway barriers, then another fence with the sign “private property,” to enter into the field before us. My grandmother could only watch from afar, as two generations of her offspring were trying to renew whatever we could of the entire world she had to leave behind in that land.

I remember running, manically, in the little time we had, to get to the two buildings and the clementine trees. In roaming around one of the buildings, we found a round hole in the ground. It looked like a workshop of some sort. My father insisted that not only was it a bakery, but that it was my grandparents’ bakery. I protested at the unlikeliness of that, though I had to quickly give up, having reminded myself that this is the work of memory and its needs. My father needed a shape for his phantom limb, and this building was it. We quickly took photos, videos, a few clementines, and a cactus rib, and then rushed back to the car, as if stealing both time and space—our own time and space, thieves in our own land, where our presence is registered only through fugitivity or illegality. My father would then plant the cactus in our garden in al-‘Arroub, which bore fruit until a few weeks ago, when he had to cut it all due to a rot. Kamla’s death and that of the cactus tree perfectly coincided, as if that rememory of dispossession refused to take root somewhere else, in an iteration of the insistence on return, on rehearsing an existence somewhere else but perishing in the pursuit of another. To be here but insist on being there.

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison says, “Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” Places are still there, and pictures of what we have lived in and through them remain, right there, in the places where they happened.

When I gave my grandmother a clementine, it got her talking about the village. The bakery. The fact that it had been bombed by the British in 1936 as a punishment for my grandfather’s involvement in the great revolution of the same year. The trek from Yafa to Gaza. The one from Gaza to al-‘Arroub. A story rehearsed so many times, with the same minute details, as if she had clung to a coherent version a long time ago, to make it accessible, transferable, resistant to its phantom-like pains, age-proof. This version even escaped dementia, at least until the very last stages— though she did thank me, on our way back from Yafa, for taking her to “America.” The work of dementia, but also a painful  reflection on the foreignness of the European built environment that remains hung over our own, aiming to colonize as much of the sky as of the land.

Antonio Gramsci had once said, “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” I have always thought of my teaching and learning as a way of grappling with the infinity of traces my grandmother had left within me, without leaving an inventory. This is a difficult and life-time task that is profoundly political. To understand the historical processes of colonial and capitalist dispossession that uprooted my grandmother and continued to chase her in the refugee camp in southern West Bank, where settlements now choke the sliver of land she had claimed back; she used to be terrified of Zionist soldiers knocking on her doors at night. To understand the patriarchal system that left no legible trace of her right to the land and that she faced as a single mother of thirteen children at the age of thirty-nine. To comprehend the poverty and wretchedness she had to endure in raising children—the unrecognized and socially devalued reproductive work of attending to so many children all at once, in a tent then in a wretched room, while fighting for a source of livelihood. Grief upon grief upon grief. The common sense she has established in our family that we are from there, though most of us are yet to return, even if through a theft of time and space.

Kamla’s death brings to the surface all of these maps that the Zionist State still insists on burying. In thinking with and through these maps, in using historical inquiry to add texture to their silences, in thinking about defeat as a conjunctural iteration not an inevitable fate, in recognizing that Zionist colonialism remains precarious and vulnerable to refugees and what we embody, one organically arrives at a renewed anti-colonial commitment to Palestine. This is what Gramsci had meant by constantly searching for the inventory, which is never complete and remains open-ended—not a constant search for past selves for the sake of it, but a search in the pursuit of more sharpened political praxis.

It is in this sense that the ongoing genocide in Palestine politicizes all death, even if differentially between natural and unnatural. It is in this sense that seemingly natural death brings back to the surface uncanny questions and “ghostly matters.”[7] It is hard to let go when the dead signifies continuity so intensely. To hold onto Kamla, the heart seems to say, is to hold onto al-SafiriyyaI should have talked to her more. I should have asked for more details. I should have sketched the plan of the village. I should have asked about the bakery.

Then, I remember. That I did ask. But memory gave only what it could. The demand is, perhaps, too great. The inquiry into a life, without having an inventory, is a lifetime task.

One, then, has to let go as a last gesture of love, as Maya Angelou would have put it. Love as letting go. Angelou reflects on the difficulty of letting her mom go on her death bed.. Rather than choosing to hold onto her, she gave her permission to go after having fought an honourable life. [8]

Love lets go, indeed. Memory, though, takes on new shapes and meanings. The cactus tree may have refused to stay rooted, but it is another uncanny coincidence for our newborn, Shams, to arrive just as Kamla left. Memory metamorphosizes with every narrator. Farewell to Kamla,  and welcome to Shams, our newborn, whose own inventory of traces will surely have to find Kamla one day.

Notes

[1] See Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford University, p.116.

[2] Many thanks to Rabea Eghbariah for helping me think this image through.

[3] See Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford University, p.116.

[4] See Ghassan Kanafani’s study of the 1936 revolution, in which he explains how the defeat of Palestinian liberation forces after the 1936 revolution emboldened Zionist forces, not least their dominance over economic infrastructures, and set the scene for the 1948 moment. For an English version of the study, see Kanafānī, Ghassān. The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine : Background, Details, and Analysis. Translated by Hazem Jamjoum. New York, NY: 1804 Books, 2023.

[5] I am yet to find a matching name in the record for this officer, though I have found that Aubrey Lees was the Assistant District Commissioner for Jaffa during the revolt.

[6] My grandfather changed his name to Abdelhafez, after having lost his brother with the same name.

[7] This formulation is from Avery Gordon’s book. See Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly matters : haunting and the sociological imagination (New University of Minnesota Press ed). University of Minnesota Press.

[8] Maya Angelou, dir. 2014. Maya Angelou ‘Love Liberates’ Courtesy of Own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Gv7PwyeCk.

Feature image: Jaffa – يافا: Yaffa – The coast. 1927. Source: Palestine remembered

Hashem Abushama